We’re happy to catch up with three well-traveled and interesting classmates. 


After Dartmouth Robert “Pat” Norton earned a Ph.D. at Princeton and taught economics for 25 years at the University of Texas, Mount Holyoke College and Bryant University. During the past decade he “shifted gears,” teaching math in Boston-area urban high schools, working at a think tank and, most recently, writing a novel.


Pat and wife Gina, a clinical psychologist, live in Marblehead, Massachusetts, have four children between them and two baby grandchildren, one of each. Pat stays on the move. A few years ago he and Gina trekked in the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan. “Before and since,” Pat reports, “I have had a great admiration for the Buddha, and I try to rein in my excesses accordingly.”


What do you get when you combine a Dartmouth international relations degree with a master’s and a Ph.D. from Princeton in Middle Eastern studies, sociology and demography? Bob Hill—an expert on the Middle East and oil. Early on Bob, who is fluent in the Persian dialects of Farsi and Dari, was a UN consultant in Tehran and then worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Afghanistan.


In 1976 Bob entered the private sector, helping Gulf Oil then Chevron deal with oil supply and acquisition issues. In 1987 Bob was loaned to the Saudi National Oil Co., where he became senior consultant and chief economist to the largest oil company in the world. In this capacity he met frequently with top OPEC and international government leaders and wrote the annual “Economic, Energy and Oil Outlook” report, which helped the oil minister and, ultimately, the king/crown prince of Saudi Arabia determine how much oil to pump. Pretty heady stuff!


And then there’s Tommy Noyes, oldest son of track coach Elliot Noyes, whom many of us fondly remember. Tommy started at Duke in 1958, spent three years in the Army, arrived on campus in 1963 and was in the Tuck 3-2 program. 


Tommy had been working in Chicago when his wife, Marilyn, died in 1983, leaving him with four teenagers. Impressed by hospice volunteers, Tommy and Jane, whom he married in 1984, volunteered themselves and then started an independent community hospice in Evanston, Illinois. He’s still involved with the National Widowers’ Organization. “Men process grief very differently from women,” Tommy says.  


In 1990 Jane and Tommy moved to Portland, Oregon, soon after their son Jim had joined his four other kids—Gillian, Gib, Josh and Jane—all of whom are flourishing across the country. For the past 20 years Tommy has run a small consulting firm, TEN Associates, which helps medium-sized private companies. He’s also teaching at a local M.B.A. program and taking full advantage of the Pacific Northwest—skiing, fishing, kayaking, rafting, hiking and biking. A true son of Dartmouth.


What’s your story? Send it on in!


—Larry Geiger, 93 Greenridge Ave., White Plains, NY 10605; (917) 747-1642; lgeiger@aol.com